


Tricks of the Trade

by pprfaith



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: All seven are fucked up puppies, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Casual Approaches to Death and Violence, Discussions of Murder, Ficlet, Fix-It, Gen, Genderfuck, Genderswap, Goody's owl, Gore, Happy Idiots in Love, Immortality, Language, M/M, Mercenaries, Misogyny, Movie Levels of Racism, Pagan Gods, Period Typical Language, Post-Movie, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution, Religious Undertones, Rule 63, Semi Fix-It, Spoilers, Swearing, Temporary Character Death, female!Faraday, implied rape, implied violence against women, injuries, let's be real, so much swearing, trope alarm!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 08:00:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8154967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Random Farquez drabbles.1. It takes Faraday a long time to come back.2. "Did you see that, V?!"3. Johanna Faraday, kicking ass and taking names. (It's time to start ticking off tropes!)4. Faraday is not apologizing and Goody doesn't want to hear it anyway.





	1. Tricks of the Trade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonstalker24](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonstalker24/gifts), [moonlightcalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlightcalls/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Хитрости ремесла](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8171765) by [Kai Ender (kaiender)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaiender/pseuds/Kai%20Ender)



> 1\. For some reason, tagging this gave me kittens, if you have anything to add, let me know.
> 
> 2\. If you follow my tumblr, you know that I whined a lot last night about the lack of stories in this fandom. And the movie's ending. Which I flat out refuse to accept as reality. 
> 
> 3\. Apparently, Moonstalker24 and Moonlightcalls feel a lot like I do, so this is for you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes Faraday a long time to come back.

+

It takes a long time for Faraday to come back. 

A long time of the sky wheeling above him and the grass growing beneath (inside) him and only snatches of consciousness.

Mental note: do not get blown up again.

It takes a long time, but eventually most of his parts are back in order, glued to each other with will power, magic and the prayers of the town’s folk up the hill. He has feet again to walk on and hands to help heave him upright and he walks. 

It’s dark, past midnight, and silence covers what is left of the battle devastation. The trenches, the burnt patches of earth, the bullets, the dark stains. It’s all half hidden already, nature claiming its dead, covering the scar tissue. It makes him itchy. Peace always does. 

Beyond the burnt-out church are rows and rows of new graves. Even the bad guys got buried, a cross for each of them, and maybe that forgiveness Horne keeps ranting on about. Above those, at the highest point of the hill, are four more graves.

Faraday kneels in front of them, breath short in tattered lungs, and stares. Goodnight, Billy, Horne. 

He puts a hand each on Billy’s and Goodnight’s graves, feeling a brush of sorrow. They belong in one grave, together, but this, he figures, it’s what they’re used to. For all that they were blindingly obvious, they also weren’t. Not when it mattered. Always that last inch of distance between them, until the door to their room closed and the lights went out. 

But Robicheaux was tired. He’s seen it before, men with ghosts in their eyes and the dead trailing after. The old soldier never intended to get out of this alive and Billy, well. Faraday can’t really imagine Billy without his Goody to trail after, so that’s alright. 

He hopes they’re kicking up a hell of a lot of dust, wherever they are. 

Horne, too. The man was on the brink of something else. A bear wearing people clothes, he said, and it was only half lie. Too many scalps, too many prayers. He wouldn’t have liked what he turned into, what humans given over to nature and the wild always turn into, out here.

The fourth grave has a playing card stuck to it, neat as a pin and Faraday just knows that it was put there by Teddy Q. Touché, kid. He tucks it into the pocket of his torn vest and stands. 

Then, slowly, he starts back down the hill, where the horses of dozens of dead men are corralled behind make-shift fences. 

Steals one and laughs to himself because this is how this whole mess got started, isn’t it? A damn horse. 

He wonders where Jack is.

+

Faraday (not the name he was born with, but as good as any) doesn’t really know what he is. 

Lie. 

He knows exactly who and what he is, but the thing is, there’s no words for it, not in the English language or any other. 

He came here with the first white men because it sounded exciting, a new world to play his tricks on, danger, adventure, madness. Blood and gunpowder and death, too. He’s made of all of those things and they called to him so he put some Irish in his voice and whiskey in his veins, put on a face that looks like a hundred others, and called himself a magician. 

(He isn’t.)

He hunted buffaloes and married an Indian woman, buried her and bought a parcel of land. Lost it in a card game and shot a sheriff dead. (He’ll laugh about that in a few centuries.)

He died a lot. 

He always dies a lot. It’s the nature of all the things he is, daring and risk and lies and tricks, to end bloody.

Never got blown up before, though.

Boom.

+

He rides through the night, along the river, down, down, down, until he needs to rest. 

Sleeps, heals, gets back on his horse, and rides some more. 

The first fork down-river. That’s their meeting place and has been for as long as this continent has had white people crawling on it, Faraday among them.

Vasquez (also not his name, but just as good as any other) is there, right where he should be, make-shift camp on a small incline, hidden behind bushes. 

His horse gives him away.

His horse and the fact that Faraday knew he’d be here. 

Half expected Chisolm and Red Harvest, too. Glad they aren’t here. His chest is still full of holes and gaps, his left leg isn’t working right. Which is why he doesn’t really stick his landing, crashes into the nearest tree, curses. His horse stomps nervously. He smells like dead things, he knows.

Vasquez appears like a specter, sneaky bastard, and hooks both arms under Faraday’s, pulling him toward a pile of blankets, a saddle for a pillow. He’s cussing Faraday out in foreign tongues, part Spanish, part something older. There’s several snarled ‘guero’s in there, and a few ‘Josh’s for good measure. 

As always, he pretends not to understand the other man.

“Damn Mexican,” he snaps, slurred. “Shut up.”

As always, Vasquez pretends to be offended. 

Faraday (Josh, here, sometimes, which might be better than Faraday) gets put down on those blankets, head on the saddle, sighs. His lungs aren’t working right, still, and his heart is doing half a job, at best, beating sluggishly slow.

Vasquez clucks his tongue and goes to fetch water, well-practiced in this. Waiting for skin and blood and bones to reshape themselves, to become something like a man again. 

They’ve been dancing it for a long time, this dance. 

+

How long? 

He doesn’t remember, doesn’t care. Human calendars are weird little things, constraining. Josh measures his time differently. There’s the Big Fight, which is later called The Alamo, where he and Vasquez kill each other and then get drunk in a field of corpses. 

There’s the Long Winter where they find each other and get on each other’s nerves until Vasquez threatens to shoot him and Faraday calls him a lot worse than his usual slew of insults and they part ways for almost fifty years. 

There’s Dumb Settlers and Conquistadores, and a time before, that, too, but that time doesn’t have Vasquez, because Vasquez might actually be American, might have always been here, or south of here. Details. 

Running into each other was inevitable, really, because what they are, what they do, is too similar for them not to overlap. Faraday is adventure and tricks and a glint of madness in the eye and Vasquez is that and more, a little less trick, a little more skill, gunpowder and manic laughter, defiance and cheating at dice. 

Red Harvest’s people might have a word for them, might call them Tricksters, and that’s as close as either of them has ever gotten to finding a word for what they are, so they keep it. 

They’re tricksters. 

+

Vasquez returns with water, starts a fire, keeps muttering under his breath, angry, but not really. 

“You are such a mother hen,” Josh clucks. 

It earns him a kick against his boot. “You exploded!” is the snarled answer. “I didn’t know – “

Oh. 

Right. 

Never got blown up before. 

“Guero,” Vasquez spits, and that’s not really an insult anymore, if it ever was. Faraday pulls him down by the belt, pats his shoulder. 

“Sorry.”

More curses. 

“Where’s Sam and Red?”

“Kansas City.”

Oh, Jesus. A black man and an Indian in the big city. That’s not going to end well. There’ll be mayhem.

“Surprised you passed that up.”

A glare, dark eyes, too dark, swallowing light. Vasquez slaps an angry hand on Faraday’s ravaged chest, sparks flying, and _pushes_ , slapping magic and healing and frustration into the torn flesh until even Josh’s heart beats again, all proper, more than twice a minute. 

He sighs in relief and gets swatted over the head for his efforts. 

So, with a roll of his eyes, he does the only thing he can, hauls the other man (not really a man at all) down by the nape of his neck and kisses him. 

Thinks, briefly, of Billy and Goody and hopes they’re watching. 

Vasquez snaps and struggles for a beat, then melts into it, all anger forgotten. 

+

There is a rhythm to them. 

They find each other in times of chaos, of strife, when the world is maddest, and they fuel that fire until it eats entire states, tribes, territories. 

In the aftermath, they get drunk, fuck, play their little games, card tricks and shooting bets. Hang around each other until the quiet makes them itchy and the peace makes them sick to their stomachs. 

One of them will pick a fight and they’ll spark off each other and there’ll be fire again, fire. 

They’ll split. 

Decades will pass. 

And then something (someone) will come along and throw them together again and there’ll be chaos and strife and madness and it’ll be wonderful until it turns sour. 

(Sam Chisolm is not the first man to throw these two together, but he might be the first to survive the resulting explosions.)

+

“Let’s stick together this time,” Josh mutters, after, curled into Vasquez’ side, breathing in the ozone tang and sweat of him.

Long fingers curl into his mop of hair, tug lightly.

“You always say that, guero.”

“I mean it, too. We could find Sam and Red, see what they’re up to.”

“Emma, too?” comes the question, knowing. He has not been subtle in his appreciation of the Cullen widow and the fierce glint of steel in her eyes.

That woman’s got fire in her bones and now that her husband is gone, there’ll be nothing keeping her still, keeping her tied to a little dusty square of land and a cabin too small to breathe in.

“I expect she and Teddy will be finding Mr. Chisolm and company before the year is out.”

A hum. Agreement. 

“Huge mess,” Vasquez prophesies. 

“Giant,” Faraday confirms. A black man, an Indian, a woman, a kid who can’t shoot. And two trickster gods, masquerading as a gambling magician and an outlaw with a heart of gold. 

It’ll be just what the doctor ordered.

“Be difficult to explain how you’re alive, Josh.”

He turns his head, chin digging into the other man’s chest, and grins, bright and boyish and a little mad. “Haven’t you heard?” he asks, “I’m a magician!”

+


	2. Did you see that?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Did you see that, V?!" The Modern Day!AU no-one asked for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, I do random ficlets now.

+

“Did you see that? Fuck, V, did you see that?” Faraday demands, twisting up and back to grab Vasquez’ jacket and give it a tug. 

Red, trying to stitch up the frankly terrifying hole in his side, gives an annoyed little hiss and pulls the makeshift thread (dental floss) too tight. 

Faraday hisses and drops back down to his prone position in the back of the van. Still, “Did you see that? I blew that shit right up, V!”

With an eye roll, the Mexican mutter something uncomplimentary under his breath before patting his friend right on his face. Josh splutters. Red tugs again. “You’re lucky we stocked up before this run, or you’d be dead.”

He nods toward Red and the pile of bloody bandages, used syringes and empty vials rolling around the car’s metal grated floor. 

“I think,” Goodnight supplies from where he’s suffering under Billy’s tender ministrations, “We can all agree that we’re profiting from that.”

He’s got a bullet in his thigh and two in his shoulder and he still sounds like a goddamn snob. Josh flips him off and counters, “Yeah, well, some of us actually earned our battle scars.” 

Sharpshooters. Snooty bastards, up in their ivory towers, while he and V are down in the mire, fucking shit up from way too close. 

The van skid-hops around a tight turn and Billy raises one fist to bang against the front wall. “Careful, Sam!”

“’Pologies!” Sam hollers back, followed by Jack’s high-pitched chuckling. The fucker somehow ended up with an arrow (a goddamn arrow) in one arm, before shooting the wannabe Robin Hood straight through the head. 

In hindsight, this job was way more insane than their usual mess of crazyviolentboom. But Bogue is dead and his drug-running, protection-racketeering, all-around-asshole days are over.

Let’s hope Miss Cullen and her _associates_ don’t try to weasel out of the payment. He and Goody are lucky to be alive and from the blood staining Billy’s makeshift bandage, he had a close shave, too. As did Horne, except _arrow_. As usual, the only ones left pristine are Red and their fearless leader. Sam and Red have the Devil’s luck, or something. V acts like there’s nothing wrong, too, but Faraday saw him favoring his right arm when the taller man was lugging him away from the fire earlier. 

Josh is going to have to do some doctoring of his own as soon as they’re alone. 

Given, of course, Red doesn’t pull his spleen out of the hole in his side. “Fuck! Ouch Be gentle, you asshole!”

A flat look is the only reaction he gets, before the cruel, cruel man bites the dental floss with his teeth, like the savage he is. There are perfectly serviceable scissors in the First Aid kit, Josh knows. He put them there. 

It stings like a mother and V rolls his eyes again (Faraday can sense that shit) before slapping a hand over the injured man’s mouth to shut him up. 

Goody avoids Billy’s hands long enough to sigh out a heartfelt, “Thank the Lord, I was about to put him out of our misery.”

Billy, taking a page out of their resident medic’s book, pulls the next stitch way too tight. "That was mean, Billy. Shame on you.”

Billy grins his best assassin grin, the kind that makes Josh want to piss himself a little, and cuts the thread (with scissors!) after tying it off. Obviously, Billy loves Goody more than Red loves Josh. 

Which is okay, because Josh is a one-guy kind of guy. Speaking off. He licks the hand over his mouth. V pinches cheek in retaliation. 

Josh licks again, all slobbery like. 

V pinches harder. “Dios, just drug him already, will you?” he demands and then there’s a pinprick of pain in the crook of his elbow and Sam takes another corner way too hard and he thinks he hears sirens (more corrupt cops, yay) and V cursing and guns cocking and then it all goes dark. 

+

“Did we survive?” he asks, vision blurry, mouth full of cotton, head heavy.

“No.”

“Well,” he sighs, carefully testing to see if his busted guts still hurt in the afterlife. Yup. Oh fuck, do they ever. “Damn.”

“Stop moving, guero.”

“Why are you in my heaven, anyway, V?”

That earns him a smack over the head and the careful arm that was resting across his chest disappears. Slowly, Faraday opens his eyes and realizes that the afterlife looks a lot like the safehouse they’ve been using while preparing for this job. 

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” he chants. Tries to. Starts coughing halfway through. Guts definitely still busted. “Oh fuck, someone shoot me.”

“After all the killing I did to get you out? Forget it, guero.”

Finally, finally, Josh risks a look at the other man. He looks tired, bags under his eyes, someone’s blood smeared into his hairline and flaking off. Still sooty from the fire. Very attractive. “Everyone okay?”

“Si. You got the worst of it, insane pendejo.” That reproachful tone is something Josh hasn’t heard from anyone except his Momma before. At least until Sam came knocking on his door about a job and suddenly, there was V. Who mother hens like no-one’s business, even while threatening to shoot your balls off. 

“It was either that, or all of us getting blown to shit,” Josh argues, because they were prepping for a grand finale, fire and damnation, and the entire team was still inside the building and he couldn’t let that happen. 

“So you just blew yourself to shit.” Apparently, being a self-sacrificing hero counts for shit. 

Josh pouts, “You know, you could at least be a little bit grateful. I did save your life, dear.”

“And scare a decade off it in the process. I thought you were dead, Josh.” The least comes quietly, with a hell of a lot more of an accent than the usual. Okay. Maybe Faraday feels a bit guilty about that. About not communicating his plan before he went for it. But his earwig got busted early on and there wasn’t time for a damn carrier pidgin. 

Still, it’s his turn to roll his eyes. “Not that easy to get rid of me, you know that.”

Farday has lost count of all the times he’s survived against the odds, all the impossible tricks, the slight-of-hands, the sheer dumb luck. All the times he shouldn’t have made it, and greeted V and the others with a grin and a joke at the exit anyway. 

Luck of the Irish, he jokes, and tries not to think about it too hard. 

V makes that face, the one that means he’s torn between talking about his feelings and shooting someone in the face, then sighs and simply puts his head back down, the careful arm returning to pin Josh to the bed. 

“Sleep,” he orders. 

At the same time, a dull thud of impact comes through the wall. That would be one of Billy’s knives, then. Apparently, Goody is being a bad patient, too. At one point, that kind of thing brought all of them running, guns drawn. These days, they’re all far too used to Billy randomly throwing knives around to make a point, or Goody shooting shit to work out his issues, or Josh and V trolling the shit out of everyone to the point of making someone threaten murder. Or Horne’s praying or Red’s disgusting eating habits. 

They’re all crazy. 

So far, it’s working.

Slowly, carefully, Faraday raises one arm to smack his fist into the wall adjoining Billy and Goodnight’s room. “Keep the foreplay down, for fuck’s sake!” he hollers. 

A moment later, there’s another impact, closer to their heads. 

V snorts and bats the still-raised arm back down.

“Sleep,” he repeats.

Josh subsides. 

For a minute.

“Seriously, though, did you see what I did?”

+


	3. give a man what he wants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Johanna Faraday kicks ass and takes names. (It's time to start ticking off tropes.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, ma, I made a thing. And it got long, too. And weird. And feminist. Like, Wild West Feminist. Huh.

\+ 

When Johanna Faraday is twelve years old, old man Simmons gives her a choice: she can either take on her mother’s profession and start earning her keep with more than a few simple chores, or get the hell out of the whorehouse by morning. 

When he offers to help her choice along with dirty fingers under her dress, she breaks his nose with a bottle of moonshine, packs her bag and runs, her mother’s savings (all of five dollars and twenty-five cents) in the pocket of her apron.

She never looks back. 

+

By the time she’s fifteen, she’s learned to wear trousers and talk loudly, to aim a gun at the balls instead of the head, not only because it’s an easier target, but also because it’s more likely to make a man think on whatever folly he’s about to commit on her person. Her aim is still shaky at best, but often the threat is enough to remind them to think with their other head. 

Most of the time when dirty farm hands and wannabe outlaws come at her with hands and teeth, she can fight them off now. 

Most of the time. 

+

“You give a man what he wants, Jojo, and he’ll do you just fine.”

“And if I don’t, Mama?”

“Then he’s gonna take it anyway, honey. That’s how men do. Better give it to them.”

+

By eighteen she’s just about stopped growing, broad shoulders and a small bust, her hair in a perpetual braid down the inside of her vest. From afar, she can pass for a man and it cuts the number of fights she gets into in half. 

But she never changes her name, never hides the cadence of her voice because if she starts changing who she is because of them, she’s no better than her mama, who put on more rouge for this man, a too small dress for that man and let them call her any name they pleased.

Give them what they want, Jojo. Just give them what they want. 

Her body and her damn self belong to her and she does with it as she pleases and anyone who wants to fight her on that is liable to get a bullet to the balls. 

Her aim is improving all the time. 

+

By twenty-five, Johanna has long since become Faraday, despite her best efforts; her life settled around her. 

There’s a widow, down in Texas, who hires her to do a man’s work around her farm, something like understanding in the weathered lines of her face. Out of season, Faraday gambles, lies, and cheats to make a living, picks fights when she has to, and sometimes for fun. She does magic tricks to confuse drunkards, amuse children and whores, flashes cards and runs away from men who’d see her dead or broken.

Every now and then, when a man looks at her with the right amount of respect in his greedy gaze, she’ll fuck him. It never makes her want to don a dress and have his babes, never makes her want to stay, though, and that always makes them angry. 

Give a man what he wants, Mama, and he’ll try to take whatever is left of you, too. 

So she rides out at dawn, pays the Widow Garrett a visit, or hides out in the wild until her booze runs out. 

It’s a living, even if it’s not a life, exactly.

+

At twenty-six, she goes back to that town, that brothel that spawned her, just to see. 

Her mother is long dead and no-one is left who can even tell Faraday how she went. Old man Simmons is gone, too, and his son, Dickie, has taken over the business. 

She remembers breaking his nose, once, when they were young ones, because he tried to make her carry him around piggyback, said she had to, on account of her Ma being an easy girl. She punched him and old man Simmons beat her rear end raw with his belt and then her mama smacked her in the face for good measure, for making a ruckus about herself. 

She fleeces him at cards, now, little Dickie, and he doesn’t even recognize her until she breaks his nose a second time for trying to weasel out of his debt. 

On her way out, she steals a bottle of his finest and stays drunk for the next two days, shoots a greedy man dead in a small town and hides in the mountains for the next month. 

The only reason her face isn’t on a warrant, yet, is that she’s a female, that no man would ever admit to being robbed by a bitch in man’s clothes, and it grates that they can’t even respect her enough for that. 

Even now, guns at both her hips and too much blood on her hands to ever get clean, she’s still only worth what’s between her legs and sometimes it makes her want to set them all on fire.

+

She’s thirty, her face finally weathered enough that no-one she fucks proposes marriage anymore, when a black man walks into her current watering hole like he owns it and shoots the barkeep dead over a glass of water. 

And then he buys her fucking horse from a goddamn leprechaun and everything goes to hell. 

+

She can see the way Mrs. Cullen looks at her, half admiring, half disgusted, that strange mix womenfolk always get around Faraday when they have enough sense of adventure in them to dream of freedom, but too little to do anything about it. Emma swings a mean right hook, does well with that rifle of hers, but still wears skirts and says her prayers, bows her head and does the chores around camp like it’s her god given duty as a female on this earth.

Faraday, on the other hand, drinks whiskey, scares little Teddy, and spits on the ground at regular intervals just to see how long it’ll take genteel Robicheaux to start a brawl over it. 

Assuming, of course, he’s not too much of a gentleman to hit her. His friend, the Chinaman, certainly isn’t. She watches him fiddle with his hairpin across the fire, saw him kill that man stone dead with it, and she liked it. She has knives on her, but even men know to take knives. 

A hairpin?

No man would ever take a woman’s hairpin from her. 

His hands stop, abruptly, and Faraday looks up to meet his gaze, absently spitting on the way there. Goodnight twitches and Billy meets her gaze, stone-faced. She beams at him, flicks her eyes at his little pigsticker and back up to him. 

A single eyebrow twitches. 

Then he raises his hands, slowly, and twists the pin back into his sloppy hair, letting her see exactly how he places it for easy access. Faraday cocks her head in thought, fingering the braid over her shoulder. She’s need to put it in a bun, higher up than is fashionable, but then, fashion has never dictated her. 

Robicheaux, all sidled up to his friend, watches her hand move over the auburn strands of her hair, too long for a woman trying to pass for a man (but just the right length for Faraday, who likes her hair, damn it). He’s transfixed by it.

Across the fire, Billy’s lips quirk and she grins back at him, both of them in perfect agreement over the idiocy of (white) men.

+

As their merry band of misfits grows, she makes a study of trying to drive them all to distraction. Chisolm seems immune to any and all of her shenanigans. The only time he might blush is when she lets him catch her changing, but then, with his complexion, it’s hard to tell. 

Mrs. Cullen and Teddy Q are both flustered and annoyed by her in turns. She makes sure to sing her drunken shanties extra loud when she’s riding next to them. 

Goodnight watches her like something he scraped off his horse’s shoe and Billy seems endlessly amused by her. One evening, over dinner, they discuss the best places to stick a man with a blade to make him bleed out in under a minute. Everyone around them shifts, progressively more uneasy, in their seats. 

Faraday likes Billy. 

Horne blushes scarlet every time he looks at her, and only looks at her when he thinks she isn’t watching, a wistfulness about him that doesn’t match his bear exterior. 

Red Harvest ignores her utterly. But then, he ignores everyone that isn’t Sam, so Faraday figures she’ll survive. 

That leaves only Vasquez, and Vasquez is… well.

Vasquez. 

+

Vasquez is a damn problem. 

The Mexican doesn’t treat her like a man, but he also doesn’t treat her like a woman. He catches her changing only moments after Sam and instead of turning away, he _leers_. Then he compliments her figure, tips his hat at her, and leaves. 

The next morning, he kicks her in the hip to wake her up and shares a cigarette with her before cussing her out for being a drunk. 

He confuses her. 

It gets worse after they ride into Rose Creek and take the town in a spray of blood and bullets. 

Standing in the middle of the street in the aftermath, Faraday is wiping blood from her face with a sleeve, spitting to get the taste of dead man out of her mouth. One of them got too close for her tastes. Far too close. 

Once she’s sure she’s not swallowing corpse anymore, she refills both her revolvers and tucks them out of sight, and goes to rebraid her hair (some lowlife _yanked_ on it) while Sam ignites the masses in his awkward way. 

She hisses in pain as she encounters a tangle with something hard at the center of it. Suddenly there are deft hands working the knot, Billy appearing behind her like a specter, working her hair until it’s smooth and then braiding it with quick fingers and clever twists after dropping a button into her open palm. Must have come loose from the shirt of the man she grappled with and caught in her hair. 

Once Billy is done with her hair, he drops his hands to his sides and stays there, half a step behind her, too close. “You know, Goodnight might take get jealous if you pay that much attention to me,” she drawls, throwing a saucy wink at the man over her shoulder. 

Billy smiles back. “Goody knows better,” he counters, which Faraday takes to mean that Billy has no head for the ladies at all. Not that she’s a lady. “He’s not the one getting jealous,” he goes on, nodding sideways. 

Faraday follows his gaze to find Vasquez leaning in the shade of an awning, watching them both with dark, glittering eyes. 

Purposely, Billy takes several steps away. Vasquez’ eyes remain on Faraday, something unreadable shining in them. 

It looks almost like appreciation. 

+

The night after she bullies Goodnight into shooting bags of straw to prove his worth, the man finds her in the stable, chatting with Jack. 

Not that Jack answers, but that also means he doesn’t argue, which is just fine by her. 

The Southerner sits on a crate and watches her do a while, before she gets annoyed and offers, “I ain’t going to apologize, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“And why is that, Ms. Faraday?” he asks, offering her a pull from his fancy flask. She takes it, drains half of it, passes it back. 

“Because I done nothing wrong?”

“I meant,” he corrects, recapping the bottle and putting it back in its place, “why is it that you are always quite so contrary. It seems like it might make life more unpleasant than it has to be.”

Just the way he talks makes her want to punch him in the face. 

“I don’t make a habit of simply giving people what they want, that’s all.”

“But why?”

Maybe it’s the expensive whiskey in her belly, or the lateness of the hour, but Faraday crouches low in front of him, low enough to meet his gaze below the brim of his hat, and say, “Because I have learned, Mr. Robicheaux, that when you give a man what he wants, he’s going to start thinking he owns you.”

The only one who owns Johanna Faraday is Johanna Faraday. She leaves him with that bit of wisdom, banging the rickety stable gate shut behind her, loud in the dead of night. 

+

She ends up setting charges all over town with Vasquez, who keeps smoking and muttering in Spanish all morning. 

“What?” she finally explodes around the time they run out of dynamite and start building their own little explosive out of empty bottles and the town’s doctor’s powders and tinctures. And moonshine. Can’t forget the moonshine.

He blinks lazily at her. “What what?”

“What are you staring at, asshole?” And he has been staring. All day, every day, since they rode into town.

While he tries to formulate an answer that won’t get him shot in the balls, she steals his cigarette. He has a tobacco she’s never even smelled before, something a lot darker and heavier than the usual. Mexican, probably. It’s disgusting and wonderful and she takes a deep drag, exhaling slowly through her nose. 

“Just looking at a beautiful woman. Is that alright with you?”

Faraday snorts, finishing off his smoke and stomping on it. “Oh dear,” she simpers, “you flatter me, good sir. Should I take my clothes off and lie down right here, or shall you take me to your room?” Then, voice normal again, she adds, “Save it for someone who believes it, Vasquez.”

She turns to leave, but he lunges, catches her around the waist. She elbows him automatically and he backs off with a grunt, hands raised. “That’s not fair, guera,” he argues. “I pay you a compliment, you say I treat you like a whore. Not true.”

She rolls her eyes so hard it hurts. “Oh, sorry. I forgot, you’re different from every other man I’ve ever met. Apologies!”

Hands lowering, he shrugs those broad shoulders of his, and damn him for looking so good in black leather. “Why not?” he asks, accent thick. “You are different from every woman I have met.”

She expects him to go on, to tell her all the reasons she should like him, now, but he just shrugs again and pulls two more cigarettes out of the brim of his hat, offering her one. He points toward a desolate little hut ten paces away. “I think more boom here.”

Faraday accepts the smoke, follows his gaze and sighs. “At this rate, we’re gonna blow up the whole damn valley.”

Vasquez laughs.

+

Give a man what he wants, Faraday thinks as she stands, hastily undoing the buttons on her trousers, kicking off her dusty boots. Sam watches her with wide eyes, gun poised to provide cover as she pulls off her bloody vest with a grunt of pain and shakes her dirty white shirt loose, tails hanging to her knees. Next she pulls the tie out of her hair and undoes the braid, hasty enough to rip out a few strands of hair. 

Then she smears some of the blood from the hole on her side onto one cheek, sticks a certain something up her sleeves and tells their fearless leader, “You owe me cover, man. So cover me.”

Give a man what he wants and hopefully, hopefully, he’ll be blind to the rest of you. 

She rides most of the way, clinging low to her horse. Hears the cracks of her followers being picked off, one by one, before the men leave off, discounting her as a fleeing villager. There are bigger threats to deal with. 

Goody and Billy, hopefully, go back to helping the others and Farday prays, for the first time in decades, prays as she fakes a fall from her horse, tumbles and almost throws up from the pain in her side. The bullet went through and through, but what it nicked on the way she’ll only know when she dies from it. 

She wobbles to her feet, clutches at her wound, shakes her hair into her face. None of the men surrounding the Gatling recognize her as the bitch riding with Chisolm. She’s just a female now, a woman running for her life. 

Give them what they want, Jojo.

They won’t spare her, just because she has long hair and a cunt. But they also won’t suspect her of anything that can harm them. She looks weak, so she must be weak. Oh, they’ll kill her at some point. Men willing to shoot their own surely won’t spare a woman just for being a woman. 

But they’ll be careless until then. They’ll let her close and laugh while she pleads for her life. Being half-naked and nice to look at doesn’t hurt either.

She stumbles, falls, gets back up. Makes it close enough. 

Drops to her knees, calls, “Please, please, oh god, please.”

Bows forward, begging, forehead to the ground, hands working furiously. 

They laugh. One of them throws a lit cigarette at her. It stings her back, singes her hair, rolls off to land by her knees. Her grin, hidden by her hair, is vicious. 

She grabs it, ignores the burns against her fingers, takes a deep breath, and lights the fuse. 

She throws it, as hard as she can, and hopes they die still laughing at her. 

Give a man what he wants, and then kill him while he thinks he’s won.

Boom.

+

For the longest time, there is nothing. Then a dull roar in her ears, pain everywhere, fire, and the sky pinwheeling above. 

Blink.

The fire is gone, the sky is dark, there are pillars of smoke rising. Her ears still ring. 

Blink.

“Loco. Fucking loco, guera.” Rough hands on her side, pushing at her insides, digging under her back and knees. 

The world spins. 

Blink.

Movement, like a boat, like a slow languid morning fuck, rocking, rocking, rocking. 

Faraday groans. 

Something soft presses against her temple. Lips. Those are lips. 

More Spanish muttering. 

Blink.

A wooden ceiling. A bed under her. Pain.

Blink.

“That was sneaky,” Billy praises, looming over her like the Chinese face of god. “Very good.”

“Fuck off,” she tries to say, but all that comes out is a grunt.

Blink.

“We lost Horne, but everyone else is making a full recovery. You got it worst of all, damn woman. Saved our lives.”

Blink.

“Loco. Loco, godamn it, woman, what made you think that was a good idea?!”

“Worked, didn’t it?” she grumbles into her pillow and this time, it’s actual words coming out of her mouth. 

“They would have shot you.”

“Nah. Give a man what he wants and he gets fucking stupid.”

Blink.

Darkness. 

Finally. 

+

It takes two weeks for Faraday to be able to sit on a horse for any period of time. Every day she expects the others to ride out, splinter off and leave. Goody and Billy both took some clean shots in the shoulders and recover a lot faster than her. They could all leave. 

But they don’t. 

Instead, when she finally totters out of the Cullen homestead to laboriously climb onto Jack’s back for the first time, they’re all there, all five of the idiots, watching. 

When, five days later, she is deemed healthy enough to set out, slowly, Red Harvest and Billy hoist her into the saddle themselves. Goodnight passes up his flask with a wink. 

“Medicine,” he drawls, and swings onto his own horse. 

They ride out as a group, a man on each side of her, constantly, until they’re sure she won’t fall off and die and her grouchy cursing gets annoying. 

They make camp shortly after noon, won’t let her so much as fetch some damn water, and act like it’s all completely normal. 

Like it’s okay for her to be completely exhausted after two hours in a saddle, to be unable to walk without a limp and a hell of a lot of pain, to be completely fucking useless. For them to drag her along anyway. 

“Is this gratitude?” she asks Sam, squinting against the sun.

“For almost getting yourself killed saving all our lives?” he paraphrases. “No.”

“Then why the hell?”

He smiles and then runs away. Well, slowly walks away, but it’s not like she can follow. Maybe she’ll make Vasquez teach her the lasso. Speaking of the devil, the man appears from nowhere, starts grabbing her under the arms, hoisting her up.

“What the damn hell are you doing?”

“Creek,” he announces, like that’s a damn answer, and leaves her no choice but to limp along, hanging off him like a cheap whore. 

Once there, he puts her down on a large, flat rock and leaves her to wash her face and hands in peace. 

Once she has the dust off her skin, she settles in for a little nap. It a nice place, with the water rushing, the others close, but not too close, and she’s more exhausted than she wants to admit. 

She’s about to close her eyes when Vasquez appears above her, like he did in that damn field. He looms. 

“What?” she snaps, attempting to squirm out from under him. 

“That,” he counters, and kisses her. 

Damn Mexican is good at it, too.

Really good.

Wait. 

No.

She shoves him backwards and he goes ass over teakettle into the shallow stream, cussing up a storm as he goes. 

“What was that for, guera?!”

“You!” she hollers right back, fully aware that the rest of the boys can hear every word and not caring.

“Why?!” 

Because it was good and the way he looks at her makes something simmer in her belly and he shares his cigarettes and calls her beautiful and never once uses the word ‘ma’am’ around her. “What do you even want?!”

Because it’s not a quick fuck, it’s not her in a dress, it’s not anything she’s encountered before. 

He stops inspecting his revolvers for water damage (that baby, they’re both dry) to stare at her, gun in hand, forgotten. For once, his expression is dead serious when he says, “More important question, guera. What do you want?”

She opens her mouth to snap at him but somehow, nothing comes out. What does she – 

Hell. 

Aw, hell. 

He just had to go and ask that, didn’t he? Idiot fucking Mexican. 

She should have shot him when she had the chance. No-one would have noticed during the battle.

“I’m not going to suddenly start wearing dresses,” she tells him, abruptly, words cascading without her permission. “Or cook. Or spawn your Spanish speaking babies. Or, or – “

“Does that mean you want me?” He’s grinning, the smug bastard, and she kind of wants to punch it off his face, but she also wants to kiss him and because blood tastes like shit, she decides to do the latter first. 

Grabs him by his stupid vest, hauls him down and kisses him.

Still good. 

_Then_ she punches him.

+

She’s thirty-one (because her birthday passed in a fevered delirium in Emma Cullen’s marriage bed) and lives on the road with five men, occasionally doing good, honorable things, and cheating at cards the rest of the time.

One of them is an assassin who occasionally does her hair, his lover shares his drink with her and mocks her lack of education. The third barely speaks, the fourth is way too honest for this life they live and the fifth likes to ride next to her and call her all kinds of sappy insults in a language she doesn’t speak. 

It’s miles from the life everyone else seems to think she should lead, but it’s what she wants, and she’ll shoot anyone who tries to take it from her.

In the balls. 

“So violent, guera,” Vasquez sighs, fond grin on his face, and then passes over his cigarette before she can steal it. 

“Damn right I am.”

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any other tropes that need to be covered? Let me know. I apparently don't have a life.


	4. six pounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Faraday doesn't aplogize and Goody doesn't want to hear it anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to say I don't know how this happened, but I do. It's a mixture of watching the movie on repeat and the fact that I adore the deleted scenes. I get why they cut them out of the movie, but damn it, they are so important, character wise. 
> 
> Add to that the fact that I'm hopelessly frustrated by my own writing at the moment, and you get... this. 
> 
> Feedback much appreciated.

+

“I owe you an apology.”

The voice comes from behind Goody and he forces himself not to shoot around the way he wants to, not to jump. Although, considering the man who managed to sneak up on him is none other than his favorite drunk Irishman, it probably doesn’t matter anymore. 

He doesn’t think there is anything left of his reputation to salvage with Faraday. Not after the way the man called him out in front of God and everyone just hours ago, forcing a rifle on him and then him at a target, like shooting sandbags was ever a problem. Like it’s the mechanics that are the problem. No. The cock and pull work as smoothly as they ever have. 

“You do?” he asks, instead, leaning back in his chair as far as it will go without dumping him on the filthy floorboards of the saloon. It’s abandoned at this time of day, every able body out and about, digging trenches, laying traps and generally preparing for mass suicide. 

Faraday takes pity on him and rounds into his line of sight, kicking a chair out from under a neighboring table and dropping into it with an exaggerated sigh. Dust flakes off him and settles in a little circle around him. Not that it’s very noticeable. People have been tromping through all day and the inhabitants of Rose Creek don’t seem overly much concerned with cleanliness at the moment, in any case. 

The entire town is filthy, like a body already decaying before its heart beats its last. 

“I do.” He nods to himself, pulls out the ever-present bottle he took from Teddy Q what seems an age ago. The boy still gets a sullen expression on his sun-burnt face every time he sees the bottle, although it’s been refilled with progressively more disgusting swill a dozen times over by now. 

Neither the boy, nor the lovely Widow Cullen seem to understand that, for all his mockery, Faraday was actually attempting to teach. Speed is a good portion of any fire fight and the way the Irishman drawled, _It was never about the cards_ still sends shivers down Goody's spine. 

It never is about the cards, or the insults, the promises, the revenge, the money, the gold, the glory. What it comes down to is always the same two things: the fragility of human flesh and the way a bullet rips right through it.

Death is all about mechanics. Cock the hammer, aim the barrel, pull the trigger, pierce the brain or heart, stop either organ from fulfilling its designated function any longer. The body ceases to work and whatever soul a man may or may not possess follows shortly after. 

Cock it, pull it. Cock it, pull it. 

Death is cheap.

Too late, Goodnight rips himself out of his thoughts, almost automatically turning toward where Billy usually waits at his side, opium cigarette already lit to calm him down. But Billy is digging graves – pardon him, trenches – today. 

By the time he meets Faraday’s gaze again, the man is just quirking his lips into a smirk, one eyebrow raised. “Oh, I’m not actually going to apologize. Said I owed you one, not that I would deliver it.”

Against his will, Goody snorts. “You’re a piece of work, Mr. Faraday.”

“And you’ve got demons on your back, Mr. Robicheaux.”

He says the name mockingly, drawn out in an imitation of a Southern drawl. The rest of his statement is glib fact.

Since it’s too late for pretense between them, Goody shrugs. It’s true. He can feel the owl circling overhead, even now. “Did you fight in the war, Mr. Faraday?”

The Peacemaker at the man’s hip suggests he served, at some point, but then, Faraday seems like the kind of person to steal a dead man’s weapons from his still-warm hands and not feel an ounce of regret. It’s hard to tell how he came by his revolver.

Suddenly, the whiskey bottle appears in front of Goodnight’s face and he takes it, almost automatically, sipping from it for a moment. 

One of the townswomen comes clattering through, an armful of sheets clutched to her chest. They’re setting up an infirmary upstairs. Triage for after the fight. 

Personally, Goody doubts they’ll need it but hope does, apparently, spring eternal in the hearts and minds of those that have never seen actual battle and don’t rightly understand, despite their fears, just what they have invited into their town. 

Once she’s gone, Faraday snatches back his drink, takes a swig and then makes it disappear about his person once more. “I shot a man,” he says, abruptly, his gaze oscillating between the stairway and the front door, to and fro, to and fro. 

“More than one, I assume,” Goody counters, drolly. You do not follow Sam Chisolm into a pointless war for the thrill of it, unless you have killed far more than a single man. They are, all seven of them, guilty of that. 

Surprisingly, the other man doesn’t turn his usual sardonic look back on him, but keeps it turned toward the hullabaloo outside. 

“The day Sam, ahem, hired me, for a given value of the word.”

The damn horse. They’ve all heard the bickering by now. 

“He and his brother were fixing to shoot me for taking advantage of their inebriated state and lack of smarts to take them for all their money. I shot him.”

“Touching story, I’m sure,” Goodnight interrupts and makes to stand, to find either Billy and a cigarette, or at least someplace a drunk man isn’t unloading his demons on top of Goodnight’s own. 

But quick as a rattlesnake, Faraday’s arm shoots out, blocking his path. Finally, their eyes meet. “He’d touched my guns, you see. He was going to shoot me and leave my body in a rat-infested shithole of a mine, but that’s not why I killed him. He touched my guns. Didn’t care about much of anything beyond that.”

Didn’t care, he isn’t saying, that the man was going to kill him. That he was going to die. It’s a strange thing for Faraday to admit, to Goodnight, of all people. A strange thing to worry about, here, now, where they are all going to die so very soon. 

Goody sinks back into his seat. “If that is your attempt at an apology, my friend, you have much left to learn.”

That earns him a laugh. “I told you, I’m not apologizing.”

“Then why?” As far as he can tell, the other man doesn’t even like him. It’s not a good basis for heartfelt confessions.

A shrug. “If anyone gets it,” Faraday starts, then stops. “D’you know what it takes to kill a man?” He answers his own question. “Six pounds of pressure to pull a trigger. Seems too easy, doesn’t it? And it keeps getting easier.”

With every cock and pull, until, at some point, taking lives is nothing but physics anymore, nothing but sheer mechanics. 

People become bodies, become things, and you start looking at them and seeing only targets, instead of human beings.

And overhead, the owl circles. 

He does get it. He just doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to sit here, in an empty saloon, day drinking and bemoaning his hell-bound state with an Irishman with a propensity for cheap whiskey and bad jokes. 

This time when he stands, Faraday allows him passage. He walks across the room and out the door unhindered, steps into the sunlight with a squint. 

Behind him, he can hear a clatter of glass that means Faraday has found his way behind the bar. 

Goodnight sets off to find Billy. 

+

**Author's Note:**

> Prompts welcome.


End file.
